Upcoming Opportunity for Local Action!

On May 10-11, a conference called "Frac Sand Insider" will be taking place at the La Crosse Center. The conference organizers are touting Wisconsin as the "heartland of industrial sands" and La Crosse as the "perfect place" for the frac sand industry to showcase their products and services.

Is this what we want the Coulee Region to be known for? A mining industry that enables an extraction process that threatens our water, causes earthquakes, and wreaks havoc with our climate?

Local anti-frac-sand and conservation groups are in the process of planning a response to this event that will likely include a rally in La Crosse during the conference, calling for a ban on frac sand mining. Stay tuned to this blog for further details as plans develop!

What are you doing for Earth Day?

Friday is Earth Day, and there are a number of opportunities to celebrate around the Coulee Region!

You could start early by attending La Crosse's second "solar power hour", to learn more about Xcel's proposed community solar gardens. Any Wisconsin Xcel customer can enroll, even renters - no roof required!

On Friday, the local Fox station (25/48) will be airing "Mysteries of the Driftless Area" at 6:30, the award-winning documentary about the amazing resources in our area.

Saturday is the La Crosse Marsh clean-up, from 9-2, starting at Myrick Park's Gun Club shelter. Lunch is provided for volunteers. If you're a Sierra Club member, the local chapter is also conducting their spring highway clean-up of River Valley Drive that day, starting at 10:00.

And of course, there's the Earth Fair at Myrick Park on Sunday from 11:00-5:00! There will be an amazing number of vendors and local organizations (including Coulee Region Climate Alliance) with information and products to share, plus food, music, and kid's activities. See the full schedule of events here. There will also be a Recycling Fair nearby, in the Emerson Elementary parking lot, where you can drop off household electronics (TVs, stereos, computers, etc.).

If you know of other Earth Day activities in the area that you'd like to share, let us know!

Immediate action required.

La Crosse resident, Obbie King, has put together a very excellent and telling video about what happens when a giant corporation eats a neighborhood for parking. Please watch and share.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Today, Livable Neighborhoods came out against this planned demolition for parking as has the Powell-Poage-Hamilton Neighborhood Association and other neighborhood associations. Reportedly, some residents of homes scheduled for demolition first heard about this when they received notices to vacate!

The city has sustainability plans up one side and down the other, but that apparently all goes out the window when a giant (think Gundersen, Mayo, UWL, LHI) hiccups.

If we are to have a sustainable future, we must have in place AND FOLLOW sustainable practices, plans and policies. Having neighborhood plans and then dropping them so suddenly when a rich business whistles is similar to the DNR's decisions to ignore endangered and threatened species protections by issuing "takings" permits to the giant powerline businesses seeking to despoil our countryside with giant, dangerous and unneeded (but lucrative to the builders) high voltage power lines.

If you are able to write to your city council representative about this unsustainble development, (you can write to everyone at once through this email address: zzcouncilmembers@cityoflacrosse.org) please consider doing so as soon as possible, because this issue has nearly reached the finish line with little publicity or public input. If you are able to attend the council's April 14 meeting (no public hearing unless the council votes to permit it), please do. The meeting is in the Council Chambers, First Floor of City Hall, at 7:30 p.m. and as of now - two days before the meeting, no agenda has been published yet.  - cathy

Local food and gardening resources highlighted at "Food in the City" conference

There was something for everyone at Saturday's Mayor's Neighborhood Conference!

Do you have a garden but could use some tips on how to maximize your use of space? Or would you like to buy your plants from a local organization where the money will go to a good cause? Check out Hillview Urban Agriculture Center's classes and plant sale (heirloom and organic varieties!) on May 7th. They also sell vermicompost, produced by their vermicomposting center, if your garden is in need of some nutrients!

If you enjoy gardening but don't have the space or time for one of your own, you can volunteer at Kane Street Community Garden on La Crosse's north side, run by the Hunger Task Force. Volunteers are welcome nearly every day, and during harvest times, volunteers can take produce home with them!

Maybe you have space for a garden, but don't have the time or know-how to maintain one (sadly, we don't all have green thumbs), check out LifeLawn Gardens. This organization is "renting" yards in the city (payment is in produce) to grow food for local restaurants and farmer's markets!

Do you know a kid that would enjoy spending some time on a farm this summer, learning where our food comes from? Check out Grow La Crosse's farm camp programs at Deep Roots Community Farm. Grow La Crosse is also having a fundraising plant sale at Hamilton Elementary on May 3rd & at State Road School on May 4th.

And finally, if you want to refuel with a locally-sourced meal after your gardening work, check out The Mint, a farm-to-table restaurant on State Street near UW-L!

                                                                                                          - Kathy

Conservation Congress - April 11 - PLEASE ATTEND!

This from the Frac Sand Sentinel:

Dear friends,

Thanks to your work introducing and supporting environmental resolutions at last year's Wisconsin Conservation Congress Spring Hearings, two of these resolutions are on the ballot for THIS year's Spring Hearings! Check them out on page 21 of this document. That means that people in EVERY county in the STATE will get to vote on the following questions:

20. Are you in favor of repealing Act 1, the iron mining law from 2013?

21. Are you in favor of the legislature imposing a moratorium on new state permits for frac sand mining and processing until any recommendations that may be developed following the completion of the Strategic Analysis of Industrial Sand Mining can be implemented?

This means that we need you AGAIN to come out to this year's spring hearings, which will be held on Monday, April 11 at 7:00 PM in every county of the state, so you can VOTE IN FAVOR of questions 20 and 21. Check this document for your county's hearing location. 

Please forward this far and wide and encourage your friends to turn out for the hearings to vote on these important questions and put the state legislature on notice that the people of Wisconsin will not stand for attacks on our precious environmental heritage!

CHECK OUT THE WEBSITE: WWW.CCC-WIS.COM for additional information

[La Crosse county's Conservation Congress will be held at ONALASKA HIGH SCHOOL PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, 700 Hilltopper Place, at 7 p.m.]

Frac sand mining is one stop in the cycle of death by fossil fuels. Whatever can be done to stop that death spiral should be done.

People may be awakening to the severe and immediate threat continuing use of fossil fuels is having on future generations and on OUR generation. A recent court ruling allowing a suit by youth climate activists against fossil fuel companies and the US government to go forward is big news because more than fifty years of knowing and doing nothing may be coming to an end. No more business as usual.

Naomi Klein highlights this new paradigm in her recent article in the Nation magazine, "The problem with Clinton isn't just her corporate cash. It's her corporate world view." Unfortunately, we are at the point where you can't have your anti-fossil fuel cake and eat your fossil-fuel soaked candidate, too.

The brakes must be applied starting locally - stopping frac sand mining, demanding investments in transit rather then highways and parking, preferring locally and sustainably produced products, including food, working to change our communities' and states' policies and budgets - and continuing to the national and international scale.

Start on Monday by voting to repeal the 2013 iron mining law and by voting in favor of a moratorium on new frac sand permits.

Group art project during April 9th march!

To raise awareness of the climate benefits of gardening/green space during Saturday's March for Climate Action, we would like to "plant" a symbolic garden (or gardens) with your art contributions! If you can, please create and bring a flower or other plant, or anything you would find in a garden (maybe a pollinator?), on a stake or stick that you can "plant" during our march. If you have friends or family who are concerned about climate change but can't make it to this event, ask if they would like to send a "garden art" contribution with you for our symbolic planting!

Climate-Food Connection

You may have noticed that our March for Climate Action is on the same day as the Mayor's Neighborhood Conference: Food in the City. This is not a coincidence. We thought this would be an excellent opportunity to show people (or remind them of) the connection between climate and food/gardening. The warmer temperatures, droughts, heat waves, floods, and increased pests that come with climate change are going to affect food production, globally and locally. Droughts and food and water shortages linked to climate change are already occurring and contributing to global instability.

But... growing food locally and gardening in urban areas can both minimize and mitigate climate change! Locally grown food has a much smaller carbon footprint than food transported across the country, or from the other side of the world. And any green spaces (instead of pavement) in urban and suburban areas will help us cope with the warmer temperatures and extreme weather events of climate change. Among other benefits, green spaces can reduce heat buildup (e.g., urban "heat islands") and reduce runoff during storm events. Read more here.

Join us on April 9th to help raise awareness of this and other ways that we can make a difference!